Republicans may have become too radical to take control

Joe Biden knows he’s unlikely to keep the cushy deal he has now, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the opposition has become its own worst enemy, Holly Baxter writes

Marjorie Taylor Greene is hoping to continue winning big off anger and paranoia (Getty)

The midterm elections – held two years into a presidency, during which a number of House and Senate seats and governorships are up for grabs – usually go a certain way. The party that has a president in the White House is all but guaranteed to lose either the House or the Senate. Indeed, it’s not unusual for them to lose both.

Joe Biden knows he’s unlikely to keep the cushy deal he has right now: a Democratic Senate, House and president. Indeed, the Democrat majority in the House is wafer-thin, with 220 voting Democrats to 212 Republicans. For a while, Republicans have been crowing about how they’ll “take back Congress” – but in the past couple of months, Mitch McConnell got a little quieter about the possibility of a GOP-led Senate.

It seems that a lot of female and more moderate voters in the Republican demographic turned away from the right-wingers after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, thus paving the way for numerous effective abortion bans across the country. As radically right-wing Republican politicians publicly celebrated, a lot of their voters expressed their distaste. A referendum on the issue in deep-red Kansas showed a majority of voters did not want to see a state-wide ban. After that, many GOP politicians started playing down the Roe overturn as a “victory” and instead attempted messaging that blamed Joe Biden for inflation and high gas prices.